Should a sex offender, particularly an offender against children, be locked up forever? If yes, fine, problem solved - campaign for that. If no, then it follows that the offender will be released on completion of sentence. Then we have the problem, as with all crime types of course, of trying to prevent that offender from reoffending, keeping him constantly under supervision, while allowing him to live his life otherwise normally in the wild, so to speak. Now, even without making allowance for holidays, sickness and meal breaks, toilet breaks etc, it takes at least five people to keep someone under observation around the clock. And that's if he's a good boy and agrees not to slip out of the back door, to guard against which would double the manpower commitment. And if our sex offender learned spook-like tradecraft, he would still find no problem in evading his watchers. And that's just one sex offender. What about the major drug dealers, the violent gangsters etc, do they need watching too? How much tax do we want to pay for all these watchers?The system we have is full of holes, completely unworkable, and the police have been ordered to make it work, within their existing resources. Well of course they can't, it's impossible. So sex offenders are not watched as a matter of routine, it can't be done. So yes, they are free to go missing, whether for innocent or sinister reasons. But it's unfair to blame the police for thisThere are such things as problems without a solution. For our "civilised" society this may be one of them, although if we lived in a less "humane" society, certain solutions may become apparent.